“The banality of evil” someone once said about the Holocaust, and that phrase kept coming to mind as my son and I headed to
Auschwitz last Sunday.

It’s a 30-mile bus ride from Krakow, a surprisingly pretty trek through lush Polish forests and meadows strewn with wildflowers
and picturesque villages.

It took us about 90 minutes to reach Oswiecim, a town of century-old homes with lace curtains and window boxes. We passed
a supermarket advertising a sale on cabbage and kielbasa; a gas station where the purchase of five liters of gas came with
a free hot dog wrapped in pretzel bread; a crowded sidewalk outside a Catholic church.

“Mass must have just ended,” my son said.

One of the few favors that the Nazis did
for Poland was to give German names to Polish cities. Between 1939 and
1945, Oswiecim
was Auschwitz — a name now linked to genocide. After the war, the
city reverted to its Polish moniker; today, the name Auschwitz
is reserved for the sprawling complex of Nazi extermination and
labor camps just south of town.

The complex is a state museum. There’s
irony that during World War II, Oswiecim was basically a one-industry
town and that
industry was death, and you could say the economy is still built
around that. Today, the museum is Oswiecim’s second-largest
employer. The largest is a German chemical company, Bayer, that
first located here to take advantage of Auschwitz’s slave
labor. It was, incidentally, the same company that manufactured
Zyklon B, the poison used in the Nazi gas chambers.

Auschwitz is one of Poland’s busiest
tourist sites and it was thronged when we arrived. In a country where it
can be hard
to find a person of color, this is one place with an unusually
diverse crowd. The horror of the Holocaust draws people from
all over the world.

The guided tour takes about three hours, and is solemn and matter-of-fact.

The guide showed us the iconic entrance
sign that says “Arbeit macht frei” — German for “work liberates.” A
barracks where
inmates slept five to a bunk, so tightly packed that it was
impossible to turn. The square where inmates were forced to stand
for hours in grueling heat or freezing snow for prisoners counts.
The building where the medical experiments occurred.

We were led past a room filled with human hair; another filled
with shoes; separate mounds of eyeglasses and toothbrushes and combs and
luggage.
A display showed the Nazi bureaucracy behind the camps — the
blueprints for the gas chambers, the logs of inmates, telegrams
exchanging details about the shipments of Jews.

There are photographs everywhere —
disturbing photographs of frightened women clutching their children,
gaunt men with hollow-eyed
stares, piles of bodies.

The guide walked us along the railroad
tracks that brought Jews from all over Europe into the center of the
camp. We stood
on the platform where Anne Frank and hundreds of thousands of
others went through the “selection process” — the division of
those sent directly to the gas chambers versus those sent to the
labor camps.

Not far from the tracks are the rubble remains of two gas chambers and crematoriums. The Nazis blew up the facilities in January
1945 just before they were chased out of Poland by the Red Army.

The scene today is a mix of the macabre and the pastoral. Barbed-wire fence surrounds green meadows. Forest disguises the
remains of other gas chambers. It feels haunted — or, at the least, haunting.

More than a million people died here.

My son and I climbed to the top of a watchtower to get an overview of the camp, and then headed for a shuttle bus to take
us back to the main parking lot.

As we settled into our seats, the bus driver turned on the radio to a station featuring hard rock.

My son nudged me. “Listen,” he says.

The bus pulled away and I got my last glimpse of Auschwitz as AC/DC sang, “Hey Satan, paid my dues. ... I’m on the highway
to hell.”